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Tuesday, 25 December 2012

The
Canary Islands are an autonomous province of Spain, and also the
westernmost outpost of the European Union. Like the rest of the EU, the
islands are facing a crisis brought on by years of open-ended
immigration.
Many thanks to our Spanish correspondent Hermes for his translation of this article from Alerta Digital:

Canary
Islands: there is no room for more immigrants. The Canarian president
warns that the Canarian economy cannot provide solutions for more
people.The Canarian president, Paulino Rivero, asked last
Sunday for a “calm and scaremongering-free” debate to be held on the
number of inhabitants in the archipelago, because in his opinion, the
economy of the islands is unable to manage the population growth and
reduce unemployment.
Paulino Rivero states in his blog that the
figures speak “loud and clear” regarding the almost 180,000 foreigners
who arrived in the last 10 years, and the 23,000 newcomers registered in
2011 due to migratory flows.
The population in the Canary islands
has grown by 388,178 in almost 10 years, and the reality confirmed by
the statistics “must force us to calmly reflect on the archipelago’s
carrying capacity”, the president explains. He asks for carrying out an
analysis on how many jobs the Canarian economy can create, and to detect
the impact of this unstoppable population increase in the islands and
in the delivery of public services.
“I think it’s rather evident
that the Canary Islands cannot grow indefinitely and expand without end,
a demographic growth which began in 1960,” Rivero reflects.

A debate with a “mature approach”That
is why he asks for a debate “with a mature approach and without delay”
on the capacity of the islands to provide solutions in terms of
employment, health care and education to this kind of population growth.
“We
should not brush away a debate by contaminating it with gratuitous and
unjustified accusations of promoting attitudes of rejection towards
people coming here. It is not about marginalizing those who are
different, but about establishing certain limits that allow our economy
to supply jobs for all who are now in need of one, and to offer a proper
level of public services,” he explains.
He warns that it is very
difficult to accommodate the public system of basic services to such a
huge population growth, and he adds that above all it is materially
impossible for the Canarian labor market to accept so many job-seekers.
Paulino
Rivero points out that it is not possible to “stand idly by” nor make
cuts to the funds for educational policies “just as the Popular Party
did” by reducing from 42 to 10 million euros the funds for the Canarian
Integral Employment Plan, thus leaving thousands of Canarians in an
unfair and unacceptably vulnerable position.